Sometimes a bit familiar, but pretty good Sci-Fi runner movie

Rating: 7/10 (28 March 2015)

"The Island" is part sci-fi thriller and part chase action flick. I found this combination to be a little rough on the edge but overall enjoyable.
Giving a synopsis of the plot is tricky because there are quite a few "shocking" developments throughout so I'll be brief. Basically the Earth has been decimated and only a few people are left alive. All of humanity lives within an isolated compound and you stay there until you are selected randomly to live in the last paradise on Earth, "The Island". Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) discover that something is not quite as it seems and attempt to escape.
It might not be the first time you've seen this scenario play out, but I don't necessarily count that as a flaw if the film brings in some original material. How many romantic comedies, or horror movies, when you really think about it have a plot that revolutionary? I feel like the premises is legitimately interesting and thankfully the revelation about the titular island is pretty quick so you won't be waiting for the characters to catch up to the audience for too long. At first you get some decent thriller elements with our protagonist trying to figure out what's going on and finding a way to escape while showing off some of the darker elements of this world. Then we get some big action set pieces that are a lot of fun and use some pretty impressive special effects. A criticism that I have for "The Island" is that the action climax is towards the middle of the film, not the end. Then another misstep; it breaks up the rhythm of the movie when during the conclusion it chooses to go back to the action stuff instead of going back to logical tone, which would be the paranoid, dystopian future thriller story. The movie concludes with a typical action mano-y-mano fight that is pretty ridiculous and not that exciting either.
Thankfully the movie doesn't have some of the incredibly bad comedic bits found in most of Michael Bay's other films and the naive protagonists have enough wits about them to stay mostly out the typical comedic "Fish out of Water" scenarios. It isn't a great movie but it's entertaining and there's more stuff that works than not. (On DVD, May 18th, 2012).